{"id":66893,"date":"2021-06-01T04:00:44","date_gmt":"2021-06-01T08:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/?p=66893"},"modified":"2021-06-03T09:18:52","modified_gmt":"2021-06-03T13:18:52","slug":"professors-award-winning-poetry-unmasks-plunder-of-asian-american-bodies-korean-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/06_01_2021\/professors-award-winning-poetry-unmasks-plunder-of-asian-american-bodies-korean-history","title":{"rendered":"Professor\u2019s Award-Winning Poetry Unmasks \u2018Plunder\u2019 of Asian American Bodies, Korean History"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dr. Joey Kim\u2019s first book of poetry has poetic timing as Asian Americans have been targets of violence across the U.S. during the COVID-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n

Venturing through Korean history, the feminine body, U.S. foreign policy and coming-of-age in midwestern America, Kim\u2019s \u201cBody Facts<\/a>\u201d will be released by Diode Editions on Tuesday, June 15, after winning an international publication contest last year.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

For 13 years, Dr. Joey Kim has been writing a collection of poems that would become her first book of poetry, ‘Body Facts.’ Kim’s book won an international publication contest last year and will be released by Diode Editions on June 15.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s urgent,\u201d said Kim, assistant professor in the Department of English Language and Literature in The University of Toledo College of Arts and Letters. \u201cAsians have been here in the U.S. since the 1500s, but it hasn\u2019t been until recently that there has been a national reckoning of Asian Americans as not perpetual foreigners.\u201d<\/p>\n

Writing the poems over the last 13 years was therapeutic for the Asian American scholar.<\/p>\n

Using tweets from former President Donald Trump and comments from childhood neighbors and classmates, Kim found a place to unpack her identity, the double consciousness of growing up in two cultures at once, the accrual of racist encounters and the historical and generational impacts of war and colonization.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy collection is able to put a face and a name and a story\u00a0to these voices,\u201d Kim said. \u201cThese voices speak back to a history of Asian American representations that have largely been essentializing and stereotypical.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kim grew up in Ohio as the daughter of doctors, who were immigrants from South Korea, and speaking Korean as her first language.<\/p>\n

She wanted to be a writer, not a doctor, while white neighbors and classmates wanted to know where she was really<\/em> from.<\/p>\n

From the poem \u201cOrientalism,\u201d Kim quotes childhood classmates on the school bus:<\/p>\n

\u201cWhere are you really really from?<\/em><\/p>\n

Haha, you eat dog and monkey brain!<\/em><\/p>\n

Why does your lunch smell like feet?<\/em><\/p>\n

Your face is flat like a plate! Ching-chong Donkey Kong!\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>How do I get to where I really came from, if I\u2019ve only ever been here, in Ohio?<\/em><\/p>\n

In the same poem, she quotes Trump\u2019s response after being asked by a reporter whether he plans to attack North Korea.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ll see\u201d \u2014<\/em><\/p>\n

If this land is a land for me, and the ones like me who can only spectate in<\/em><\/p>\n

spectral horror \u2014 while he tweets us into oblivion.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cMy poems speak to psychological effects of growing up in places where you always have to try to maneuver these different cultures,\u201d Kim said.<\/p>\n

\u201cPlunder,\u201d<\/a> one of the poems in the collection, has already been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, a prestigious national literary award given out annually since 1976.\u00a0 Kim also won first place in the Art Commission\u2019s 2020 Merit Awards.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe inspiration behind \u2018Plunder\u2019 is the dispossession of Korean land and bodies during the Japanese occupation and Korean war, which is still technically ongoing,\u201d Kim said. \u201cThe poem interlaces the speaker’s childhood memories, American plastic surgery experimentation on Korean subjects, and the fetishization of women’s faces and bodies as objects to be modified and plundered.\u201d<\/p>\n

In her collection, Kim writes from different perspectives of the body \u2014 body as human and the pressures people place on their bodies, or body as land, the Korean Peninsula, to be exact.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are still occupied by U.S. forces and in the shadow of American imperialism,\u201d Kim said. \u201cIn one of the poems, I talk about the Trump era of Korean discourse and our sense, as Korean Americans, of feeling stereotyped with North Korean dictatorship.\u201d<\/p>\n

The poetry expands beyond \u201cslurs,\u201d \u201cslit eyes\u201d and foreign policy. When Kim talks about the body as a site of celebration and trauma, she also is reflecting on the brain hemorrhage and traumatic brain injury she suffered while skateboarding in May 2015.<\/p>\n

She had only been skateboarding for a couple of months while in graduate school at Ohio State University before she became a Ph.D. candidate when she took off her helmet and tried to go down a hill at a skatepark by herself.<\/p>\n

“I was in the ICU for 11 days. At first, the doctors told my family I\u00a0most likely wouldn’t be able to walk or talk in the same way again,\u201d Kim said. \u201cBecause of my youth, I had, in the words of my neurosurgeon, a ‘miraculous’ recovery. My hearing is back, too.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOur bodies hold and hide our histories,\u201d said Min Jin Lee, author of \u201cFree Food for Millionaires\u201d and \u201cPachinko,\u201d a National Book Award Finalist. \u201cLine by line, Joey Kim breaks us open to expose our yearnings, secrets, and untold treasures, saving us from our own fortress of history, propriety, and shame. Kim\u2019s ‘Body Facts’ is our needed revelation.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cKim\u2019s work, from multiple angles, portrays the ways in which peace and beauty are forced to find new escapes from tyrants and the fallouts of their power,\u201d said Marcus Jackson, author of \u201cPardon My Heart,\u201d the 2019 Ohioana Book Award winner for poetry. \u201cKim admirably illustrates present and historical threats, all while rendering the ageless brilliance of family and spirit.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

‘Body Facts,’ Dr. Joey Kim\u2019s first book of poetry, which ventures through Korean history, the feminine body, U.S. foreign policy and coming-of-age in midwestern America, will be released by Diode Editions on June 15.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":875,"featured_media":66896,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50,60,1,7],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66893"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/875"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66893"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66893\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66895,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66893\/revisions\/66895"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66896"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}